The New American Church Monthly (Volume 7, No. 5) (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1920. Excerpt: ... The Unpopularity of the Church Rev. Hamilton Schuyler THE thesis of this article proceeds upon the assumption that the world is reverting to paganism, not the paganism of the Roman Empire of the first five centuries of our era with its gross licentiousness, its heartless cruelty, its contempt for the masses, but rather a paganism refined, educated, cultured, supersensitive to human pain and earnestly solicitous for the intellectual and material well-being of the individual. In our modern paganism the arts and sciences are held in high esteem; indeed they and they alone are depended upon to redeem humanity from grossness and ignorance and elevate it to a high pitch of civilization and material prosperity. The essence of paganism stripped of the adventitious circumstances which characterize it in any given age is the denial of spiritual considerations as compelling motives for human action and the substitution in their place of purely utilitarian principles. Paganism implies the tacit repudiation of any ideals except those which are concerned with the course of human life upon this planet. It regards man as a creature whose existence is confined to a period coterminous with his physical life and neither believes in nor regards any other alternative. The philosophy of paganism is of the earth earthy. In its modern form it indeed deprecates unsocial actions or anything which tends to imperil the integrity of the state, but it is totally unaware of sin as an offense against a divine and eternally righteous Being to Whom man is ultimately responsible for his actions. In its full development Paganism finds no place for religion, at least for any religion which it cannot control, and decries any appeal to a higher law than inheres in its own utilitarian ideals. I...